


Team Under Construction

by sterlinglee



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Backstory, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Ougiminami, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-05-09
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1497010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterlinglee/pseuds/sterlinglee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"You guys really were a bunch of troublemakers, but if you hadn't been here, we couldn't have played in matches, either.  You all came into this with good builds and instincts, so do your best, okay?"</em><br/> <br/>Akimiya Noboru puts up with a lot from the rowdy underclassmen who take his team by storm in his second year.  Not every team is a championship winner or an inspirational underdog, after all, and Akki knows his is more like a street gang.  But when it comes down to it, the numbers don't lie, and neither does the season record: they're Ougiminami.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Team Under Construction

**Author's Note:**

> this is it guys. leave my rusting sword at my grave and continue the quest without me. I got carried away with characters so minor they only appear in like 2 chapters

_They can’t be all bad,_ Akimiya Noboru repeated to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose as if that would make the scene in front of him disappear, or turn into a problem he was better suited to dealing with. _They can’t be all bad, because that’s just not how human nature works. Yeah. And besides, they came to play volleyball, didn’t they?_

When he took his hand away from his face, Towada was still dangling Yokote by the back of his jacket, holding a squashed melonpan just out of his reach. The libero’s toes were dragging along the gym floor, and he was cursing a blue streak as he tried to get into position to kick Towada in the shin. It was the first week of Akki’s second year at Ougiminami High, and he was pretty sure the new first-years were going to give him an ulcer before the season was out.

“Asshole, I was saving that!” Yokote snarled, swiping ineffectually at the sweet bread. 

“Aw, calm down," Towada drawled. "You spilled my cup noodle at lunch, I’m hungry." Akki was, as always, struck by how reasonable he sounded. They hadn’t known each other long, but he had already gotten the impression that if you gave Towada an inch he’d take several thousand square miles and plant them with signs that read, “who, me?”

“That was Oyasu’s fault, he tried to sit on the end of the bench even though he _knew_ there wasn’t enough room! Why don’t you take it up with him, huh?”  


“Oyasu blew off cleaning and went home already, and anyway you’re the one who got me yelled at for making a mess. You owe me damages, so quit squirming.”  


Yokote rolled his eyes, but before he could tell Towada where to shove it, Akki cleared his throat and rattled his armful of cleaning supplies self-consciously. It was a lot like a small animal trying to make itself seem bigger in the presence of a threat, but, _no_ , he was not going to think about that right now. “Everything all right, Towada-kun, Yokote-kun?” 

They turned to face him with matching blank expressions. “…Everything’s fine of course, Akki-san,” Towada said. Akki felt his smile go tight at the corners.

“Unless this is some kind of new age teamwork exercise, I think you’d better put him down!” he said brightly. He knew that dialing up the helpful-senpai vibe was not the optimal response to this situation. But really, what was he, a babysitter? One of those highly trained monkey handlers he’d seen at the zoo? If there was a technique to this, like maybe clicker training, he didn’t know it. 

To his relief, Towada set Yokote down with a thump and swatted away his last grab for the stolen bread. Trying to make him give it back was more than Akki was up for—maybe if he just grew a few more centimeters, he’d feel less like hiding in the nearest corner when any of the first-years looked his way. Instead, he shoved the brooms into Towada and Yokote’s hands. “T—there’s a ton of dust underneath the basketball hoop, so start there!” he said, managing to keep his smile up. Smiling threw them off— _right, that’s right, walk away before you remember that you could probably give your setter a coronary by looking at him funny. Thanks, guys._

Letting a soft breath escape through his nose, Akki turned his attention to his own cleaning. He had been sick with apprehension on the first day of practice, wondering if they’d have enough new applicants to keep the team above water. He was the only second-year, and there were just four third-years besides him. When he walked into the gym, his heart had lifted at the sight of a pack of first-years brandishing registration forms—and tried to crawl up into his throat when he realized that they looked less like students and more like a street gang.

One of the biggest ones, a tall rangy guy with slicked-back hair, turned to stare him down. He’d learn later that this was Towada, but at that moment all he was thinking was, _Crap, I made eye contact! Does that mean I challenged him to a fight?_

The other first-years noticed him too, and the weight of their unimpressed stares was nearly tangible. He took a deep breath, reminding himself not to judge by appearances, and shot them his sunniest smile. 

“Y—you’re the new first-years, huh? I’m Akimiya Noboru, second-year setter. Nice to meet you guys!”

After a moment of silence, Gangster Hair inclined his head in something that would have been ashamed to call itself a bow. “Towada,” he grunted. “Setter, huh. You any good?” One of his friends hocked loudly, getting ready to spit, but before Akki could blink Towada had a hand fisted in the guy’s spiky bleached hair. “Not in the damn gym, Tazawa.”

“Fuck off, Towada,” Tazawa groaned, rolling his eyes. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“Huh, you think you can stop me?” Towada shook him the way you would a misbehaving cat. “With those stick arms? Dream on.”

Tazawa was obviously about to say something else, accompanied by hand gestures, but Towada thumped him between the shoulder blades and forced him to bend. He stared meaningfully at the others until they mumbled their own introductions and bowed in a ragged line. Akki laughed nervously, and the first-year who’d introduced himself as Oyasu gave him a _look_. Yeah, this was getting off to a great start.

A month later, they had their first training camp at their usual facilities, which sat at the foot of the mountains. Over the course of the hour-and-a-half bus ride, Akki negotiated a spitball ceasefire between Moritake and Oyasu, sustaining significant damage in the crossfire but eventually managing to reach terms satisfactory to both parties. It involved giving them both parts of his lunch, but the usually standoffish Moritake even offered to share one of his magazines with the interesting centerfolds, which he was pretty sure was a sign of gratitude. As the bus pulled to a stop, the third-year setter thumped his shoulder and said, “It’s kind of scary how well you deal with those guys, Akki-kun.”

“Fujioka-senpai? O—oh, well, thanks, but I—”

“You’re saving the rest of us a lot of gray hairs, seriously. Just don’t tell the captain I said so.”

“…Right.” The idea that he was doing something right with Towada and company was news to him. But he didn’t have much time to consider it, because they piled off the bus straight into their first practice match of camp.

For the first time, Coach benched the third-years en masse and made Akki the setter for a lineup of six first-years—probably out of the same perverse curiosity that made mad scientists dump chemicals together in hopes of getting an explosion. Nerves tingled in his gut as he headed out onto the court, but once the whistle blew, his mind stilled. He could almost forget about the spitball he’d just noticed in his hair. He felt the lines of tension that had been thudding in his shoulders and temples dissolve into a kind of full-body awareness, his senses like a taut string.

They had their share of slip-ups—Tazawa and Oyasu had this tendency to rush the net together like it was some kind of personal competition, and Karamatsu mistimed some of his blocks through sheer enthusiasm. But it was _fun_ , the way they all charged headlong and expected him to keep up.  


At their match point in the first set, the ball sailed up from Yokote’s neat receive like a gift, and Towada’s name rose to Akki’s lips on instinct as he moved to make the toss. Towada jumped at precisely the right moment, and the sound of his connect was solid and true. The ball struck at a hard angle just behind the opposing blockers, and when Towada landed he was grinning like a cat in a room full of overfed canaries.  


It all happened in a matter of seconds, but in that short time Akki felt his heart rate rise and his vision come clear and bright. Before he knew it he was cheering in one voice with Towada, their shouts rising under the high ceiling, and they were shifting formation to rush forward again.

He didn’t have a whole lot of time to relish their victory, because at lunch the next day Oyasu dumped ice down Karamatsu’s shirt, and that was a situation with the potential to go nuclear very fast. You only had to look into his eyes to tell that Oyasu was a food fight kind of guy. Karamatsu generally preferred to sit back and watch his friends’ antics with detached amusement, the way you watch two cabbies get into a fight a few cars ahead of you in a traffic jam. But when he got going, he was in it to the death, as proved by an incident with the baseball team that they Did Not Discuss Ever. 

By the time Akki got to them, the only option was prying them apart. He didn’t have a crowbar or a surfeit of common sense at the moment, so he used himself. He ducked Karamatsu’s wild right hook and wedged a shoulder in between his teammates, leaning in to lever them apart. Oyasu spat, Karamatsu growled, and as a chunk of ice fell out of Karamatsu’s hair and into Akki’s face, he reflected that there would be some interesting explanations to be made at his funeral. But there wasn’t any point in giving up halfway, so he planted a hand on each player’s chest and shoved until they stumbled apart. 

Towada collared Karamatsu before he could lunge back in, and around the edges of his usual bored look there was a hint of something more serious. Akki took Oyasu by the elbow and steered him away, hoping to distract himself before he could process what he’d just done and have some kind of delayed panic reaction. “Just don’t look at his face, Karamatsu-kun,” he said soothingly. “You know it’s just his face that makes you so angry. Don’t look at it and you’ll be fine.”

Towada started calling him “Akki-kun” not long after that. The rest of the first-years seemed to take that as a license to do the same, and it sounded right—when Oyasu called to him for that sharply peaking toss he liked, or when Yokote shouted his name through gritted teeth to entrust him with the next receive. On the whole they were the kind of guys who barked your family name at you without bothering to add honorifics, but they seemed willing to make an exception for him.

The season seemed to be speeding by faster and faster as they moved towards the Inter-High preliminaries. They spent a few days in training with several of their local rival teams, although, true to form, they didn’t make the greatest first impression. Akki’s schedule had been out of whack as he tried to balance exam prep and volleyball, and when they entered the gym, where several other teams were already practicing, he was plodding a few steps out of line with the others. He felt slow and dizzy from his nap on the bus, which hadn’t done more than take the edge off his pent-up stress.

Distantly, he heard a shout, and then a ball clipped the side of his head and winged off to the other side of the gym. He made an embarrassing noise like a small animal being sat on, staggered a few steps, and barely managed to keep his balance. He was still sleepy, and his head hurt, but all of a sudden the image of himself staggering dazedly around the gym seemed wildly funny. He snorted, and his snort turned into a chuckle, and his chuckling turned into bent-double, gasping, heaving laughter.

He looked up, still unable to contain himself, as a player he didn’t know jogged over and peered worriedly into his face. “Oh my god are you okay, I’m so sorry, I’m still working on my jump serve and I didn’t— _ohhmygod_ —” He yelped and skidded backwards out of Akki’s field of vision, and Akki straightened up to see Towada shaking him by the collar of his jersey.

“Asswipe, what’s your fucking problem, huh?! Listen to him, he’s snapped, you probably gave him a fucking concussion—”

“Ah, Towada-kun, um…”

“You try and break our setter, we’re gonna stomp you into the goddamn _dirt_ , you hear?”

“Tazawa-kun, please don’t—”

“I vote we just do it anyway, we can’t let these guys think they can walk all over us.”

“Moritake-kun, _put that down please!_ No! No, _on the floor_.” Akki sucked in a deep breath and felt the last of his shakes leave him. “I’m fine, okay, look, no blood or anything. So,” he said, turning a bright expectant eye on his teammates. “No hard feelings, right?”

He was met with stubborn silence. Towada in particular had a belligerent, conflicted look on his face that seemed to mean, I’m Worried About You But Like Hell I’m Going To Say It. Akki pursed his lips, gave them one last stare, and then extended a hand to the player with the wild jump serve. “Akimiya Noboru, second-year setter,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. What team are you?”

“Uh, Hinoyama North. You guys?”

Akki snickered, he couldn’t help it. He knew they must make quite a picture, a gaggle of scowling punks framed by four nervous third-years and a very smiley second-year. Maybe that knock to the head had rattled something loose, but all of a sudden, despite the chaos he had absolutely not signed on for, he was kind of looking forward to getting on the court. “We’re Ougiminami,” he said.

In their first match of that year’s Inter-High preliminaries, Akki managed to make use of Oyasu and Tazawa’s belligerent presence to decoy a successful back attack through Towada. As the ball slammed down on the other side of the net, he heard what sounded like a little kid’s voice cheering, shouting, “that was awesome, aniki!” Towada’s gaze jerked towards the stands, and Akki’s entire perception of his teammate shifted abruptly on its axis.

On their way out to the bus later, he asked Yokote, “So, Towada-kun has a little brother?”

Yokote’s lips quirked into something that was more of a smile and less of a smirk than usual. “Yeah, his name’s, uh, Soujiro or something? I met him once, damn kid’s almost taller than I am.”

“Already? He and Towada-kun have all the luck.”

“Goddamn, don’t even get me started. I’m surrounded by huge bastards. _We_ are,” he corrected, after a moment’s thought. 

“Haha, hey, you calling me short? I’m almost 2 centimeters taller than Karamatsu-kun, you know.”

“But if I call _him_ short, he’ll bust my ass," Yokote jabbed him in the ribs with a sharp elbow, smirking. Akki laughed and doubled over in an exaggerated display of agony, giving him a light shove once he let his guard down. It was only later that evening that he realized what was happening to them—as the bus drove on through purple dusk and Moritake, fast asleep, shifted position to take up ninety-three percent of their shared seat instead of just eighty-seven, he reflected that their space had become his somehow, without his noticing. Or, no, that wasn't quite it. He'd made the first push when he dove in to break up that fight, and it had all snowballed from there.

The rest of their competitive season was put in jeopardy by a number of things, including but not limited to fistfights, alleged thefts, and Towada’s blood feud with his history teacher. That last one brought home to Akki the significance of sharing his high school athletic fate with these particular individuals. Sure, their problems were his problems. They were in it together; blood, sweat, tears, et cetera. But how exactly did that translate to his having to apologize on behalf of the team, the sport of volleyball, and the entire Towada family tree until Sasagawa-sensei agreed not to suspend his teammate?

"None of us third-years saw what happened, and anyway, you have this, I don't know, kind of respectable look to you," Fujioka explained sheepishly. "People can tell right away that you don't have a knife in your sock. That counts for a lot in social situations." Akki went away feeling unfairly stereotyped, but it wasn't as if he could argue. 

He was able to report to that afternoon's practice with his mission accomplished. In place of an apology, Towada attempted to explain the many ways in which he was definitely not at fault, but Akki pursed his lips and put up a silencing hand.

“Do _not_ ,” he said mildly, marveling at the fact that he was used to this by now. “You say you’re Sasagawa-sensei’s innocent victim, but only one person in this scenario had their glasses knocked off by a paper airplane with a rude drawing on it, and I haven’t noticed any problems with _your_ vision. Or your aim.”

“Yeah well, my aim is why you need me to be able to play,” Towada said, unconcerned. He was about to go on, but from the other side of the gym Oyasu made a noise Akki had come to understand as _help, I tried to give Moritake a noogie and am now seriously regretting this choice._

“Prove it on the court,” Akki said firmly, and went to go extricate Oyasu before he sprained something. 

They were knocked out of the running in the third round of the Inter-High prelims. Akki kept his disappointment to himself, made sure to smile as though there was no bitter taste in his mouth—he didn’t feel quite like he had the right to crumble, when it was his seniors who’d taken the hardest blow. When he put on the captain’s jersey for the first time, he was shaking. 

He was happy—of course he was happy. But he also felt as though his toes were curled over a ledge far from the ground.

“Hey! You better not be about to puke or something, dammit.” Towada said, startling Akki’s gaze from the number one on his chest. While he was lost in thought, the rest of the team had already piled out into the gym. They were waiting for him.

Akki smiled, and it was mostly real. “I’m fine! It’s just…I knew I was going to have seniority, but—me being captain? It’s definitely kind of weird, right?”

Towada did one of those interesting eyebrow-contortions he was so good at. “…What the hell are you talking about?” He didn’t give Akki time to answer, but turned and headed out into the gym. “Hey, morons, put that back,” he yelled, his voice echoing in the high open space. “Captain Akki-kun’s coming, so shape up, you hear?” 

********

_Losing to Shiratorizawa almost crushes him. He smiles for the team, keeps on smiling because the dullness in their eyes scares him more than their menace ever did. Only when he’s sure they’ve left the locker room does he crumple onto the bench and cry._

_When he shows up to the Karasuno game he’s glad he came, because_ someone _has to give his team the loving kick in the pants they so often need to get in gear. When they bow to him in the hallway he thinks he might drop dead with pride, but since that’d be embarrassing for all involved, he just grins._

_A couple weeks later, he happens to be outside in time to spot the team in uniform seeing off their latest practice opponents. Towada nods at Akki as he passes, distracted by the way his little brother is hanging on his arm and talking a mile a minute about how “you gotta show me how to do a big spike like that okay? I’ve been practicing, so toss for me when we get home!”_

_“Y’know, I forgot to tell you earlier,” Akki says, “but that captain’s jersey really suits you.” Towada turns bright red, and Akki’s grin widens. Off to the side, Tazawa and Oyasu are teasing the first-year setter Natsuse, but in a minute the kid will be laying them low with a few blindingly sarcastic words and a guileless smile, and calling them both “senpai” to boot._

_Akki’s steps slow for a moment as he watches them, until their shouted thanks to the other team jolts him back to the present._ They’ll be all right, _he thinks, and continues on his way._

**Author's Note:**

> unruly teams with cute flustered responsible captains make this world a better place (see Datekou). over the course of writing this I began considering the possibilities of Towada/Akki but I think I'll save that screaming crisis for another day


End file.
